Underneath Blackness: The ‘Black’ Face of Eurocentrism: What’s Whiteness Got To Do With It? Dr Ornette D Clennon Manchester Metropolitan University Critical Race and Ethnicity Research Cluster https://critracemmu.wordpress.com/ o.clennon@mmu.ac.uk Critracemmu
Eurocentrism Performing ‘whiteness’ (Wallerstein, 1997; Wallerstein, 2003; Mignolo & Escobar, 2010) View of ‘blackness’ as an “artefact” (Fanon, 1986[1952], p. 6) of ‘whiteness’ Africanist presence of ‘blackness’ in American literature that acts as an existentially dialectic tool of ‘whiteness’ (Morrison, 1993)
Disavowed ‘Blackness’ ‘Blackness’ is disavowed and as a consequence, its alter ego is pathological (Altman, 2006) Invisibility of ‘whiteness’ in terms of its universal “eye” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 3)
Market ‘Blackness’ ‘Blackness’ is traded as a market commodity (Collins, 2006) Is market ‘blackness’ literally just a ‘black-face’ (Gubar, 1997) form of ‘whiteness’? The market transformation of ‘blackness’ into a commercial hegemony via ‘market freedom’ and ‘individuality’ (Graeber , 2006; De Angelis , 2001; Bentham, 1787; Hayek, 1976) Globalisation and Postcolonial theory as two sides of the same coin (Krishnaswarmy, 2002)?
Coloniality of ‘Blackness’ Eurocentric expansion via neoliberalism has taken the form of a soft global power that commodifies culture (Adorno, 1991) “Coloniality of power” (Mignolo, 2002) Positioning commercial ‘black’ culture as a form of global romanticism (Kvifte, 2001) called Afro Neo Romanticism The use of ‘black’ visual and cultural signifiers (Baudrillard, 1972) to expand its global cultural expansion Beyonce and Cultivated-authenticity (Benjamin, 1999; (via) Lewandowski, 2005) Is Benjamin’s “Open spaces as revolution” the same as ‘Contested/subverted/authentic cultural spaces as revolution’?
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